From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I don't want to take a position which supports absolute freedom to
take any substance
I do.
Free Life Commentary,
Issue Number 17
10th May 1998
Nothing New, but Still Worth Sending Out:
Another 1400 Words Against Drug Prohibition
by Sean Gabb
I notice I have not written about drugs for several years. There is
nothing in the news that prompts me to write about them now. I simply
feel inclined to see how well I can express what has become a huge
argument in a small number of words. And so here are my thoughts on why
the sale and use of recreational drugs ought not to be illegal.
Let us begin with the libertarian argument. People should be regarded as
having the right to do with themselves as they please. This necessarily
includes the right to do things that others think stupid or distasteful
or immoral. If I want to, I have the right to join an odd religious
group, and give it all my wealth; to have tattoos put all over my body,
and to have parts of my body pierced in artistic ways; to devote myself
to the poor in Africa; to be hung up on hooks and be flogged within an
inch of my life by someone wearing a leather mask; and of course, to
consume whatever mood-altering substances take my fancy.
No one else automatically has the right to interfere with my choices. If
you think I am doing wrong, you can persuade me. You can get down on
your knees and beseech me to better behaviour. You can threaten me with
exclusion from your company and that of your friends. Beyond that, you
have no right to go any further, unless you can prove that what I am
doing involves the use of force or fraud against another person, or that
it is the sort of act - like selling defence plans to an enemy in arms -
that threatens the dissolution of the entire community.
Taking one's own drugs in consenting company is not an act of the first
kind - it causes no one else the sort of harm against which they can
legitimately demand protection. Nor is it an act of the second kind. We
are told endlessly that drugs are a danger to social stability - that
they lead to crime and degradation and so forth. There is no evidence
for this claim.
The British past provides a compelling example. Until 1920, drug use was
uncontrolled. Between 1827 and 1859, British opium consumption rose from
17,000lb to 61,000lb. Workmen mixed it in their beer. Gladstone took it
in his coffee before speaking. Scott wrote The Bride of Lammermoor under
its influence. Dickens and Wilkie Collins were both heavy users.
Cannabis and heroin were openly on sale. There was no social collapse.
There were few deaths from taking drugs. Most deaths involving opium
were individual accidents, and even these were negligible - excluding
suicides, 104 in 1868 and thereafter to 1901 an annual average of 95.
Hardly anyone even recognised that a problem might exist.
The claim that drugs are bad for a society is a lie. The truth is the
opposite. It is the criminalisation of drugs that is bad. All the ills
that are now blamed on the availability of drugs are more accurately to
be blamed on the illegality of drugs.
When drugs are illegal, only criminals will supply them. And when
criminals are allowed to dominate an entire market, they will be able -
indeed required - to form extended, permanent structures of criminality
that could never otherwise exist. They will then make drugs both
expensive and dirty.
Drugs will be expensive because bribes, transport inefficiencies,
rewards of special risk, and so forth, all raise the costs of bringing
drugs to market. Therefore much of the begging, prostitution and street
crime that inconvenience Western cities. As many as two-thirds of
American muggings may be to finance drug-use.
Drugs will be dirty because illegal markets lack the usual safeguards of
quality. When a can of beer is stamped "8 per cent alcohol by volume",
this does not mean anything between 0.5 and 30 per cent. Nor will
caustic soda be used to make it fizzy. Brewers have too much to lose by
poisoning or defrauding customers. Drug dealers can afford to be less
particular.
Therefore frequent overdosing. Therefore poisonous additives. Therefore,
the frequent transmission of aids even today by the sharing of dirty
needles.
Moving from the costs of the crime resulting from illegality, we come to
the costs of enforcement. These also are massive.
In the first place, the Police need to become a virtual Gestapo if they
are to try enforcing laws that create no victim willing to complain and
help in any investigation. They need powers to stop and search people
and to search private homes that would never be necessary to stop things
like burglary and murder. They need to get involved in entrapment
schemes. They are exposed to offers of bribes frequently too large to be
turned away. In one way or another, the War on Drugs leads to the
corruption of every enforcement agency sent into battle.
And that War cannot be won. The British
